Tori's Secret

      As we’ve already discussed in class, Blizzard, the company that runs World of Warcraft, makes its money several different ways. First, they sell people the actual product for a set price when it is released and people buy the software to install the program onto their computer. Second, in order to keep using the product they already purchased, they must also subscribe and pay monthly dues in order to keep their account active. And last but not least, expansions keep popping up and everybody who is anybody on WoW is now suckered into purchasing another disk with more software on it, once the old software has become obsolete. Although it is laid out fairly simply, it is quite complex and an incredible achievement in the world of monetization, kudos to Blizzard. But could it get any crazier? …You bet.

        Since we are all aware of how Blizzard makes its money by appealing to the public, let’s talk about how the public makes money off of Blizzard in return. Considering we have already analyzed Facebook at great length I’ll start off with a similar, legal, example: Farmville. Farmville is a “farming simulation social networking game” in which you manage a settlement of virtual land. You plant and harvest crops, orchards, raise livestock and build on your property. You earn points and gold tokens that allow you to purchase more land, a larger estate, etc. throughout the game as you complete these tasks. However, the game is tedious and a lot of work. If you do not check your crops on time they will die and you will lose money. This is why Zynga has partnered with Visa and Paypal in order to make it so that people can buy gold and not wait for their crops to advance in order to make “money”. For just a dollar or two people whip out their credit card so that they have to put in less effort.

        A similar option is available to World of Warcraft users. Many gamers have formed computer programs that prevent their IP address from being traced or make it so that it is always changing and impossible to single out. On these servers they run World of Warcraft and advance accounts to high levels and then sell the accounts or coveted items and characters that are fawned after.  Although it is illegal, it appeals to people’s sense of instant gratification (which we all know is overvalued in our American culture) and people’s sense of social belonging. In an online gaming community your status is everything, it’s your reputation, it’s the only you people know of and the only you they have to go off of. The more prestigious of a player you are, the more prestigious you are as a person, therefore people are willing to put forth a lot of money and pay these local hackers cash money for this virtual life.

        Blizzard does do rollbacking of characters that have been hacked, frequent updates and releases expansions which helps minimize some of these problems. The biggest offense was that in China. So many people partook and it was even a punishment in prisons there; Dig in the daytime, slay monsters at night, so that the prison was making a profit off of the game. Fortunately, China has severe internet restrictions and WoW is closely monitored now. But how big of an issue is it still? How can Blizzard take further precautions and what are some possible prevention methods?          

In today’s society it’s so easy to access information over the internet that sometimes we forget that it also applies to information about ourselves. If we have a question, “Google it!” we say. The fact of the matter is that if you Google someone’s name the first thing that comes up in most cases is their social networking site (Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) I know that if you type in my name, not only does my Facebook pop up but so does my MySpace, my ex-boyfriend’s MySpace, and then anyone else that has my full name on their site. Even if you have privacy settings set on your profiles, that doesn’t mean that everyone that has tagged you in a picture or everyone that has posted a comment about you has the same security features enabled on their’s. 

What a lot of people don’t take into account is the impact that this has onrelationships. More specifically, relationships with people you haven’t even met yet. If you go into a job interview most of the time your potential new employer will Google your name. The scary thing is that this is your first impression, and in some instances it’s the only impression you’ll ever be able to make because of how competitive the workforce is. Like I mentioned before, Google brings up everywhere your name appears in it’s index. If that happens to be on somebody else’s non-security enabled site, and they say things about you that could hurt someone’s opinion about you, you are once again jeopardizing this first impression. In this case you aren’t even the one that they are judging directly. Unfortunately, people are quick to go off of what other’s say and consume the opinions of people they’ve never met simply because they have nothing better to go off of. Even my old MySpace isn’t who I am now and I would be embarrassed for anyone to judge me based off who I was back in eighth grade, when I last made updates to the site.

Recently I was talking with one of the girls I live with and she mentioned that a few days after she moved in she mentioned one of the other girls’s names, Kayla, that lives in our house to her parents. The first thing they did was Google her and they found out things about her and even her parents. My friend admitted that now every time she talks to Kayla, sometimes Kayla will mention things that she already knows because of what her parents had told her because of what they found online and she has to pretend she never knew! Just some food for thought, it could happen to anyone!

With all of the technology we have today, we could use almost all of them for the same purpose but in all actuality we don’t. For example, there are some people you would rather text than talk to on the phone because you don’t talk to them near enough in person to have that be comfortable. Or if you just have one question you might text someone, such as your best friend or sibling, if you are not looking for an immediate response, whereas if you were in a hurry or wanted to have a more extensive conversation you would just call them up!

                The same idea applies to social networking. My freshman year in high school I was on MySpace talking to my friend and I told him that I had a crush on this guy that we had both known since second grade. We were on Christmas break, not even in school, and in a matter of minutes he had me add him on msn, started a conversation with all three of us and then dropped out. We started talking on our own over instant messaging for the next couple days and then he finally asked me to be his girlfriend. I had had a crush on him since the fourth grade, went to elementary, middle and high school with him and still, we were both too nervous to approach the topic in person after being such good friends. We ended up dating for over a year and it was a good relationship but still, it would have never started if we hadn’t had that technological component between us even though we saw each other more than 180 days a year for over seven years.

                Even while we were dating I remember there were some things that we would only talk about over msn! I feel like speaking through text over the internet has more cons than it does pros. We were both very sarcastic people and a lot of the time and tone of voice is so easily misinterpreted in text. Abbreviations become more common and we lose the grammatically correct way of speaking. People lose that face to face connection and if you took away the web and phones it would make normal, everyday encounters “weird”. How many people from my generation know how to read and write in cursive? From what I’ve witnessed in school and during the SAT/ACT exams it’s next to none and I believe a lot of that comes from the large part social networking plays in today’s society.  Why try to fix something that’s not broken?

But most importantly people don’t talk the same way they do over social media sites and we forget who we are in the real world because we are so wrapped up with who we are online. We are more comfortable with who we are on the web because we are more distant and less interactive than we are with who we actually are in real life.